“There’s nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death. They don’t honor their own lives . . . Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can’t hear it. Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die.”
-Charles Bukowski
This morning we gave up on imprisoning the cats after yet another 4 a.m. serenade from Slane. Peg let them out onto the porch so we could have some quiet time.
They behaved pretty well. No one fell off the railing.
And did you see what happened in Ohio? The revanchists, the sneaks, got their behinds kicked by their constituents. Scary that the outcome came down to Cincy, Cleveland, Columbus, Akron, and Toledo voting to protect their referendum rights, while the hill people looked up from their Oxycontin fog to vote away the ability of the majority of voters to make policy. It'd be nice if the party that could barely muster 43% of the vote would take a look at their political agenda and try to cobble together something 50.1% of the voting population might find palatable. My bet is that, instead, they'll just double-down on trying to disenfranchise anyone who disagrees with them.
Statistics I've seen suggest that a clear majority of the folks on the losing side yesterday believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Hell, I think I swore an oath to that effect a few years ago:
Will you be loyal to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of Christ as this Church has received them? And will you, in accordance with the canons of this Church, obey your bishop and other ministers who may have authority over you and your work?
Answer
I am willing and ready to do so; and I solemnly declare that I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation; and I do solemnly engage to conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of The Episcopal Church.
Was I BSing everyone, including myself, that day, or did things just come to pass that would make pretty much all of that ring false? "Willing and ready" isn't "willing and able", after all. I guess I pledged to try my ass off to be and believe all those things. I just came up short.
Anyway, I'm way over on the other side of the aisle when it comes to the suggestion of scriptural inerrancy. The Bible's just another book, or more accurately a compendium that tells the story of a people, a really unlucky people whose strength came from a belief, belied by all evidence, that they were God's chosen tribe(s). In that sense, The 1619 Project could be seen as a parallel text-; take a look at how it's organized, and the themes that emerge, and you'll see what I mean.
Unless you're in Florida, and within five hundred feet of a school. Pull out that hardback bit of history and the thought police will pin you to the side of your Subaru.
So if the Bible's just another book, and often not a very good one, then its place in the library of sacred works stands next to War and Peace and Atlas Shrugged and the instruction manual for this laptop and the McDonald's Value Menu (5th ed.). All holy in their own way; all human expressions. That's what makes them sacred.
But taking a pantheistic view of the written word doesn't make it all canonical. It does, however, liberate us to hold our own little Council of Trent, right here at our desk, and decide what comprises the canon that guides and reflects whatever we treat as an examined life. Whom would I include in some sort of Donkey Bible?
Mark Twain, for his incisive wit.
Marcus Aurelius, with his pithy yet deep passages that have guided much of my post-war life.
La Rouchefoucauld, that cynical French courtier who shone a spotlight on the weaknesses and absurdities of human relationships.
Tolstoy, whose Death of Ivan Ilyich keeps calling to me in the midst of this year of death and loss with its message about regret and the vain futility of ambition.
Camus, because, well, the Myth of Sysiphus. It's all futile, but smile anyway. It's also the only life you've got.
Whoever wrote Ecclesiastes, which sits comfortably in the same realm as Camus and Tolstoy.
Leonard Cohen, maybe a little self-absorbed but occasionally so insightful about love and loss that his words almost knock you out of your chair.
Elbert Hubbard, who taught finding meaning in work and love, the two things that fill a well-lived life.
Charles Bukowski, the most prophetic writer on the list, a hard-drinking poet whose hints at a well-lived life run opposite Hubbard's. You're all too damned distracted with meaningless busywork to look up and touch the holy all around you. Have a drink and a smoke. The world's not going to end just because you're not at your desk. Maybe for a few days.
I'll think of more right around the time I hit the "publish" button. The bottom line is that if we pulled people into the pews on Sunday and built a liturgy out of passages from this crew, shedding a new light or insight on our life experience, in a generation I like to think we'd find ourselves in a better society than one governed by the mental contortions of Paul or the obsessive, controlling madness of Leviticus.
Maybe I could gather all of these on one shelf, and build myself a liturgical calendar organized around themes, sort of like the church I keep wandering in and out of. We'd have the season of work, the season of love (with each week devoted to one of the Greek categories of love), a season of gratitude, a season of sacrifice. Or something like that. I'm just making this up. It's how all religions start.
But now time to dive into a nasty business with a New York lawyer who keeps garnishing a pro bono client's bank accounts on a judgment acquired on a forged promissory note. There ought to be a law; there is a law, in fact. Not sure how they do things up there, but opposing counsel is about to get some Southern-splainin' from down here in God's country.
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